The Firefox browser now has a built-in page translator that works even without the Internet::Mozilla has announced the release of an update to its Firefox browser. In version number 118, users will find a significant innovation - a built-in translator
For anyone interested in the tech behind that, it’s based on Project Bergamot: https://browser.mt/software (now you don’t need the extension anymore).
You still need an extension for certain languages. It seems like they only have about a dozen available, a few more on the way, and hardly any eastern languages yet.
Production
- Spanish
- Estonian
- English
- German
- Czech
- Bulgarian
- Portuguese
- Italian
- French
- Polish
Development
- Russian
- Persian (Farsi)
- Icelandic
- Norwegian Nynorsk
- Norwegian Bokmål
- Ukrainian
- Dutch
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If not natively, I bet you could work something out with headless mode, perhaps.
I’m willing to bet you could work something out to make it work
Otherwise there’s always selenium which I imagine would include functionality to do the page translations.
+1 for interest!
If you want to dig into it, I believe this is the core project for the translations.
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I’ve been disappointed with Orion and Safari lately. Not ready to switch to Chrome, but maybe it’s time to give Firefox another shot.
Us common folks may not have flying cars or jetpacks yet but this shit is pretty dope.
that’s really good news even though I don’t use firefox anymore (sorry vivaldi user) I’m glad firefox is actually improving.
Nothing against Vivaldi, used it a lot since it’s release, but found my way back to Firefox last year since I just couldn’t stand giving Google anymore power over the web market. The less I give Google, the better I feel, but also the better off the web will be. Once again as a company Vivaldi does a fantastic job and their stances on privacy are admirable, but I just can’t support Chromium these days.
I totally understand you that’s the reason I was using Firefox also. but after discovering that their main revenue is from Google and that firefox is basically kept alive BY Google just so they can say that it looks like their supporting different browsers is a big no. Performance and display problems on my phone were really annoying (I was using Mull on my phone and firefox on desktop).
You’re so close but you’re still missing the point. Google gives money to Firefox to make it the default search, that’s it. Google has zero say what Firefox does besides it being the default search engine. Google does the same thing with Apple’s Safari, they give Apple literally over a Billion dollars just to be the default search, so would Apple be bad then too? If I can encourage you Just to use Firefox and try not to make excuses for staying with Google’s browsers just because Firefox isn’t absolutely perfect.
You’re also missing the point. Google gives firefox around 85% of it’s revenue. We are really fighting an uphill battle against against corporations that have even bribed our allies. I don’t want to argue because at this point it’s pointless I don’t want to be pitted against people who support FOSS because that’s what I want to use and that’s what I use most of time. But when it comes to browsers we have lost that battle.
Unless we find 800 million dollars in donations, Mozilla is just the pet dog of google at this point.
My dude you’re not here to convince me, you’re here to try convince yourself you’ve already resigned. Stop making excuses and just use Firefox. Over and out, cheers!
What?
But you can visit websites offline, you can self-host but then you already use a language that you understand.
I guess the offline it’s mostly to advertise privacy. Or maybe can it translate pdf documents?
Not necessarily. A lot of great open source web based projects are written in languages that I sure as heck do not understand. This is a great feature for all those cases, as well as the other cases of offlined content.
More importantly, the reason this is being highlighted is because it means your website data isn’t going anywhere off your computer to be translated.
I don’t think it translates Nerd to Common
I’d rather not send the pages I visit to Google’s or Deepl’s servers. This keeps translation local, which is an awesome feature.
This was prieviously available as an addon/extension. It’s really cool they are able to do this locally, and it works well.
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It’s great. Turns out it’s AI generated also.
I had to search for it quite a bit to find it. It’s in the (stupid IMO) menu with the three lines, they made to replace the proper menu bar.
If it detects another language on a website, it shows up on the URL bar
Thanks, actually popped up automatically, maybe a first time thing IDK.
It doesn’t detect language as far as I can tell, it seems it just uses the domain name.
As a long term Firefox user, I’ve been disappointed with Mozilla’s decisions in the recent years, but this is awesome. This is the kind of features Firefox should be receiving instead of useless UI changes.
I can’t seem to find the setting. Is it not available for Firefox for Android (Fenix), do you know?
Yea probs not
As long as Mozilla remains committed to a free and open internet, I will remain a faithful firefox user.
Even if every update after this one is a useless UI change. :p
Are you saying you don’t want a button that looks like a pinned tab that only lets you change between a handful of time-limited themes?
Im saying I don’t care.
I open browser search and consume the results. I don’t care for what buttons it has or doesn’t. I’m just happy it’s not Chrome or Edge.
But at the very least you can remove it
For a born again Firefox user, what decisions?
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You can use a handful of add-ons with default Firefox for Android, otherwise you can use whatever add-ons you want in Firefox Nightly/Fennec/Iceraven through setting up collections. You can disable pull to refresh in settings.
…I like the tab button…
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Firefox Android used to have an actual tabs bar? Interesting
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no PWA support
Or rather removing PWA support
No *full pwa support
no support
I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.
Firefox rocks! (And subsequent forks of it)
While this is theoretically a neat feature, how can I stop it? I don’t want it to offer translation of each and any English page into my native tongue. As most of the Internet is English, this thing pops up everywhere, and at least for English I don’t need it. This is as annoying as Clippy was.
Each time it offers to translate a page, there’s a “Never translate from [LANGUAGE]” button.
You can disable it in the menu that opens when you click on the button at the right of the address bar
It would be nice if that worked, but it doesn’t. I found a “Settings” requester under Language -> Translations where it offers to disable translation for a list of languages, but I cannot add any.
In the annoying popup, there is a cog wheel, clicking that will show a menu. That menu have a checked checkbox, Always offer to translate, uncheck that.
Thanks, that did it.
Most of the internet is not in English lol. 45% of the web is in English.
But I share your sentiment.
Going to accelerate now that AIs can translate every article into 16 different languages. Gotta get those metrics ups.
It’s really neat IMO. It should’ve been there earlier
Sure. We should have had smart phones in the 80s.
And electric cars too.
I’m sure there’s some use cases out there, but that kind of sounds dumb at first. You can use a built-in page translator that translates web pages… without the internet. How are you getting to these pages in the first place then? I’m assuming the appeal is more from the privacy aspect, because it’s not communicating with anyone else to get those translations?
It’s much faster for one. Google Translate is super slow compared to this and it sometimes refuses to work if the Google overlords think you might be a bot or something.
I’m sure the privacy minded people like it. As opposed to a translating service knowing all the webpages you’re reading.
“Works offline” doesn’t necessarily mean it never goes online.
It doesn’t necessarily mean it, but the context here is pretty obvious. Firefox has long been privacy friendly.
However, like others pointed out, this feature is useful in numerous use cases beyond just privacy. E.g. one of the systems I manage at work is a stand alone network, i.e. not connected to any external network whatsoever. I’ve had instances where having this feature would’ve been convenient. Then you have scenarios where you’re offline on a plane or an Internet outage or whatever. Your browser can open all kinds of document types, not just HTML (e.g. text files, PDF files, etc.).
You can open local html documents in your browser. They don’t need to be downloaded from the internet. This can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as for CLI tools that produce HTML to visualize data.
It’s, for example, quite important for folks handling internal documents in a company. You get those documents served via the company’s intranet, so not publicly accessible. And if you click that translate-button with other translators, that internal document is published into the internet, which is a breach of confidentiality, or even a breach of contract, if you’re handling supplier documents.
If your company is big enough, it may have a self-hosted translation service that you can use, but for everyone else, foreign language documents were a bit of a problem so far.
I think the point isn’t that you wouldn’t be connected to the internet, rather that the translator itself isn’t yet another thing that will phone home with all of your data
Why does this Firefox thumbnail go so hard tho
